Port Virel wouldn't exist without the harbor.
Most of the Somatic Republic's western trade ran straight through it. Cargo ships in and out around the clock, containers offloaded onto the docks, hundreds of semis pulling away toward inland destinations by morning. The locals absorbed the rhythm of it the same way they absorbed everything else about living here. It became background noise. Part of what the city sounded like. You stopped hearing the low horn signals after a while. You stopped noticing the way the whole western side of the city smelled faintly of salt and diesel on humid mornings. It was just Port Virel. It was just how things were.
It wasn't a flashy place and it didn't try to be. Main intersections had cameras on the poles. Police response averaged around ten minutes on a normal call. The Somatic government liked its cities organized and legible, the kind of place where patterns held and disruptions got logged. There was a tidiness to that logic that most residents had made their peace with a long time ago, the way you made your peace with anything that was too large and too settled to push back against.
Missing people weren't common here.
By the time dispatch arrived at Mariner Heights it had been eight minutes.
Right on schedule.
Two officers. Standard uniforms. The older one had a five o'clock shadow that had been going gray at the edges for a while, the kind of face that had seen enough apartment calls to stop being surprised by them. He moved through the space with a practiced unhurriedness, the kind that wasn't indifference exactly, just experience. The younger one looked like the academy was still recent, notepad already out, pen uncapped, posture a little too straight. He kept glancing at the older one in small, quick intervals, calibrating himself against whatever reaction he was or wasn't getting.
Eli had let them in and now stood near the kitchen counter, watching them work. The apartment felt smaller with other people in it. Or maybe it just felt more exposed. Every detail he'd grown up around and stopped noticing, the dish rack beside the sink, the row of spice jars his mom kept alphabetized, the photo strip from the arcade machine at the pier taped to the side of the fridge since he was nine, all of it was suddenly just evidence of a life that belonged to someone who wasn't here.
They moved through the apartment slowly, stopping at the trash can at the end of the counter.
"This was from earlier?" the older one asked.
"Yeah," Eli said. "It fell when she dropped the phone. At least that's what it sounded like on the call."
The younger officer was near the door, writing things down in careful strokes. "No signs of forced entry?"
"No."
Marcus stayed back near the hallway, quiet, close enough to hear everything without being in the way. Eli could feel him there without looking. It helped, in a way he wasn't going to examine too closely right now.
The older officer put two fingers against the chain lock and then the deadbolt, not pulling on them, just checking the feel of them. "Anyone else have access to the apartment? Landlord, anyone like that?"
"Not without notice," Eli said.
The two officers exchanged a look. Not suspicious exactly. More like they were confirming what they'd both already landed on.
Eli had the feeling they'd seen this kind of apartment before. Small and clean and organized. Single parent. Kid. Nothing obviously wrong anywhere you looked. He wondered how many of those calls resolved themselves by morning. He wondered what the ones that didn't looked like from where these two were standing.
The younger one asked, "Any recent arguments? Threats made? Anything unusual in the last few days?"
"No. Nothing like that."
Which wasn't entirely true. There was the phone call, the door, the sound of something moving fast and then the crash. But he didn't know how to hand that over in a way that would mean anything yet. He turned it over while he said it and felt the specific discomfort of a lie that wasn't quite a lie, the kind where you were leaving something out because including it would only raise questions you couldn't answer.
The older officer straightened his belt as best he could over his midsection. "We'll log this as a missing persons report. Normally it's a bit early for that, but with the phone left behind we'll move on it sooner."
"How?" Marcus asked from the hallway.
"Someone will come by in the morning to follow up," the younger one said. "Tonight we'll check the nearby cameras."
Cameras. Of course.
It was one of those things Port Virel residents accepted without much discussion. The Somatic Republic called it public safety and put it in the civic literature. His mom had always said the same phrase with a slightly different tone in her voice, not loud about it, not the kind of person who brought it up at dinner or made a point of saying it in front of other people. Just a small shift in register, barely noticeable unless you'd grown up listening for it. He'd picked up on the difference without ever asking her about it directly. He thought about asking her about it now and then remembered why he couldn't.
The younger officer moved toward the counter where the cracked phone sat face up, screen still dark. He looked at it without touching it.
"You said this was on the floor when you got here?"
"Yeah."
The officer studied it a moment longer than seemed necessary. Something about the way he looked at it made Eli feel like there was a thought behind the pause that wasn't going to be shared.
"We'll need to take that."
Eli nodded.
For the first time all evening, standing in his own kitchen watching someone bag his mother's broken phone, it felt like an actual case and not just a scared kid who had come home to an empty apartment. That distinction landed somewhere uncomfortable. He wasn't sure which version he'd preferred.
The officers said their goodbyes and stepped out into the corridor to knock on neighbors' doors. Muffled voices drifted back through the wall. Mrs. Kline across the hall turned her television down before answering. The sound of it dropped from a murmur to almost nothing, and Eli stood in the kitchen listening to the silence where the TV had been and to the low patient sound of questions being asked and answered in the normal tones of people who didn't know anything.
"I'm sure they believe you," Marcus said.
Eli wasn't sure if that made it better or worse.
The officers came back in a few minutes later.
"Nothing from the immediate neighbors," the older one said. "We'll widen the scope, start asking around the block."
He set a small white card on the kitchen counter. PVPD printed across the top in clean block letters. Eli looked at it sitting there on the tile, perfectly centered, slightly clinical, the kind of object that was meant to be reassuring.
"She comes back, or you remember anything you forgot to mention, that number goes straight through."
Eli nodded.
They left. The younger one gave the apartment one last look on his way out, the kind of look that was trying to catch something it had missed, and then pulled the door shut behind him.
The hallway went quiet.
The apartment felt different with just the two of them in it again. Not calmer, just emptier. The absence of the officers left something behind that Eli didn't immediately have a word for, the feeling of a thing being made official, moved into a category, given a file number somewhere in a system he had no access to.
Marcus pulled out his phone. "I'm gonna tell my mom I'm staying. She loses it if I'm not back before ten."
He stepped toward the hallway for some privacy. Eli could still hear most of it through the thin walls.
"Yeah, I'm at Eli's. No, it's not that. His mom's missing. Yeah, the police already came. I'm staying the night."
A pause.
"No, I'll keep you posted."
He slid the phone back into his pocket and came back into the kitchen. "She said it's fine."
"Thanks for staying," Eli said.
It came out quieter than he meant it. Marcus didn't make anything of it.
Marcus walked over to the front door and checked the lock without being asked. The deadbolt was turned all the way over. He stood there a second looking at the chain.
"You said she just uses the chain during the day?"
"Yeah." Eli came closer. "She only does both at night before she goes to bed."
Marcus looked at him. "So if you heard the door open while you were on the phone with her..."
"Someone locked it after."
They both stood there with that for a moment.
The chain showed no damage. The door frame wasn't splintered anywhere along the edge. No scratching around the lock plate. Eli ran his eyes over all of it the same way the older officer had run his fingers over it, like looking hard enough at something would eventually make it give something back. Whatever had happened on the other side of this door, it hadn't looked like a fight from the outside.
"If somebody came in," Marcus said carefully, "they either had a key. Or they really didn't want it to look like they didn't."
Eli didn't answer.
He was thinking about the window. The one facing the street. His mom had mentioned it that morning on the phone, the draft, the feeling that something wasn't how she'd left it. He hadn't thought much of it at the time. He thought about it now.
Marcus turned toward the fridge. "Have you eaten anything? You bolted before lunch. I saw you leave."
Eli shook his head.
"You should eat something."
"I'm not hungry."
It came out sharper than he meant it. Marcus didn't argue. He just opened the cabinet like he'd done it a hundred times, because he had, and looked at what was in there. Half a box of cereal. Bread. Peanut butter pushed to the back.
He grabbed the bread.
It was the kind of thing you did when there was nothing useful left to do.
"You're not passing out on me," he said.
Eli watched him make two sandwiches with the focused efficiency of someone refusing to acknowledge how bad the situation felt. There was something almost mechanical about the way Marcus moved through it, pulling the bread out, spreading the peanut butter in even strokes, pressing the slices together and cutting them in half without being asked. He'd been doing things like this for as long as Eli had known him. Showing up. Filling the space where something ought to be.
Marcus slid one across the counter toward him without ceremony.
"Eat."
Eli took it. He ate without tasting it, just working through the motions, the bread soft and familiar in a way that felt completely disconnected from the rest of the evening.
After a minute of quiet chewing Marcus said, "You're going to have to tell the school tomorrow."
Eli hadn't thought that far yet.
"Someone has to handle it," Marcus said. "Until she comes back."
Until she comes back. He said it like the outcome was already written, like it was just a matter of the timeline filling itself in. Eli turned the phrase over. He wasn't sure if Marcus actually believed that or if he was saying it the way you said things to someone who needed the edges taken off. Either way, he didn't push back on it.
Eli swallowed a bite and nodded.
For the first time since he'd run out of that school hallway, the panic didn't spike. It settled into something flatter and quieter. Not better. Just more manageable. The kind of state where you could function, where the next step became visible even if the one after it didn't.
If nobody else was going to figure out what came next, he would.
He didn't want comfort anymore.
He wanted answers.